What is the crowd's opinion of pump.io?

From 3.5 billion comments

Well there's pump.io which has an API that can be implemented by different types of social sites. For example Mediagoblin is starting to implement it.

This sounds fantastic. Have you considered using Pump.io to federate the forum? It could make it easy for folks to keep up with their forum activity in different forums from a single place.

That's true. I think my problem has always been that the communities I tend to find myself in simply don't use that type of tool. Others' use cases will vary. To be honest, I really hope these take off. For a while I'd switched to identi.ca (from twitter), but then it switched to http://pump.io/ and the users mostly left. Unfortunate. For those that can use these effectively: please do.

Actually, a while ago Evan disabled registration on identi.ca and moved it to the pump.io platform to encourage federation :) There are public pumps that people can join and use but the idea is to try it out before setting up a federated pump of ones own. I honestly don't know why more people haven't.

I suspect though that one of the largest barriers to federation is others dick waving and unwarranted intimidation :( I'm a security guard and I never studied computers and I wouldn't consider myself a hobbyist/hacker. I'm not that clever. Yet, I'm handing my own email (citadel), I use my own federated pump and I've already set up my own mediagoblin instance (given the PMs I get here I'm not going to share that info on reddit, sorry). I think a lot of people get intimidated, sell themselves short and don't even try to empower themselves:( I think if people just tried they'd find most things are not as hard as they've been made out to be.

I've been researching it more lately and playing around with Mastodon and I haven't loved the user experience. To follow someone there is this ugly redirect flow and I don't even know what it really achieves. Right away I wondered if I could subscribe to an entire instance to populate my feed with content, I learned this is a requested and often talked about feature request in Mastodon (https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8082) but it hasn't landed. Really, to see what's going on and interact with another Mastodon instance you need to create a new account, which is really ugly. This is a big user complaint that I've found as well.

Also there's not a lot of community. The ActivityPub term on Twitter is a very slow drip, there's only a couple videos on YouTube about it. There's only a single one from 2014 on the underlying tech of Activity Streams. I understand that it’s a W3C spec and the guy heading the Social Networking Committee is the creator of Pump.io which became ActivityPub, so it looks like it will become a spec, but honestly beyond that I don’t find it very endearing. oAuth is a much nicer flow for example because it can prompt you with a ‘Do you want to login with your other account?’ (Could probably even set it up to autodetect and just display itself as a big shiny login button in the navbar). Then you click that button, quick redirect flow (or just straight in if you’re authed already), and the identity is shared between all instances. But my tl;dr is that there’s potential but it’s just not ready for showtime yet. There is a lot flux going on around decentralized protocols atm but I’m not sold on ActivityPub.

Hopefully someone can offer some counterarguments though and maybe I’ve overlooked or misunderstood certain things.

Identi.ca is part of a federated social network called Pump.io. It is like a distributed version of Twitter where anyone can run their own part of the network. You can't actually register on that site at the moment, but there are many others that are open.

1. You can register with nothing but a username and password. No email address is even required.
   
2. I wouldn't post anything sensitive on there, because the project is still in progress. There have not been any significant security breaches though.
   
3. There is no active moderation that I am aware of. However, you are still relying on the provider of your node.

I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have about the Pump.io community. I hope you decide to join us!